Grace for Russell

By now you might have heard about one of Invisible Children's founders, Jason Russell.

Immediately after the news broke on Jason, three brilliant responses to the situation have stuck with me - Donald Miller, Mike Foster and Jamie Tworkowski.  I highly recommend reading all of these if you have a chance. 

As with the last posts on grace, I am using Jason Russell in a generic sense.

That this is really about that.

I will not pretend to know the full situation nor will I speculate on what has happened to this man. What seems to be clear is Jason was pushed to his breaking point. How and why he got there might be very different than how you or I have reached that point before.  How he responded and handled it is different than how we might have.

But the reality is many of us have encountered this in our own lives.

The place where the bottom falls out. Where the words of another destroy us, where our body seems to have also rebelled against us, where we are tired but can not sleep.  Or maybe it's the point where we have been backed into a corner and forced to live in a manner we did not choose or plan.

Then maybe we snapped and did things we shouldn't have or maybe we were on the verge of doing some thing when someone came along side us and reminded us that we were not alone. That though they might not understand, that they are with us.

That they see us.
They know us.
Even if we might not see or know ourselves.

That is grace.

Seeing the humanity in another. Seeing the beauty, the hope, the good in another. Not the past, not current mess, but the person. The creation that God called good.

Because in Jason Russell, we see ourselves.  

We are all a people in need.
We are not perfect.
We are not machines.
We make mistakes.
We need grace.
We need compassion.
We need help at times.
We need other people.
And that's okay.
_ Jamie Tworkowski, TWLOHA